The Institute of the Present

...while your mouth is full of dental tools. But then I asked myself why am I making fun of people who work with their hands and minds for long hours in order to alleviate suffering? If anyone deserves good pay and days off to golf, it should be dentists. Instead I thought I’d discuss what should be an April Fools Day joke but isn’t. And that is Los Angeles’ mayor Eric Garcetti’s appearance at a party last week with Lyft executives to celebrate their...

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Reader Feedback About Facebook

...tilts us all into a dangerous epistemological crisis. And the practice of making children more depressed so that you can sell them stuff they don’t need is deeply and profoundly disturbing. At the same time, in a common modern ethical conundrum, I feel trapped in a system I don’t support. Like many commenters mentioned, I need to hear about events distributed via Facebook. I suspect there are many of our readers who share this problem or have to...

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Zombies!

...howdown, when a brand new sparkling Mini-Cooper came at us at a high speed making use of the rounded corners our city has thoughtfully designed to allow motorists to take turns as fast as they can. We threw our hands up in anger and prepared to smack the car when the driver stopped finally, allowing us to cross. Now here comes the weird part – we made eye contact and we swear that the driver was a genuine zombie! We’re talking literally here not m...

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Hoshigaki Season!

...of red and yellow leaves that comes elsewhere. In our house we believe in making hoshigaki in the fall with persimmons from either the market or, better yet, a neighbor or friend rather than chugging those pumpkin spice lattes. We’ve got a row of seven store bought persimmons hanging in a south facing window and plans to start more. Here’s what they look like when completed. If you’ve never tried making hoshigaki, a kind of transcendent dried fru...

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2022 in Review: Cats, Mushrooms and Politics

...inez campaign. Thankfully Hugo won in November and has already got to work making our streets safer and helping tenants and unhoused people. Tech I put up a 10 meter and 2 meter radio and did a little bit of amateur radio stuff. I’m not great at it but did manage to make digital contacts as far away as Indonesia with ancient Radio Shack equipment. I also figured out how to decode airline data transmissions but did not figure out why I would want t...

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